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My host family

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

The best part of Ocotal is being able to live with a family and experience traditional Nicaraguan life on a subsistence/coffee farm, where life has not changed much in 80 or so years. When you want meat, you go catch a chicken. They grow most of what they eat, and grow, dry, roast, grind and make their own coffee. Living off the land is literal here.
Every night, we sat around their table and played a game or talked by light of my head lamp.

The view from on high

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

Sunset at the Ranchon on the mountain top in El Sauce, Nicaragua, where the Los Altos de Ocotal eco-tourism cooperative members welcome visitors to their farms and way of life, which is a step back into “old world” ways… cooking over fires, mashing corn and hand-patting tortillas at meals, oil lamp and growing and harvesting simple crops with a mind to eco-friendly practices.

You can see San Cristobal, the volcano, here too. So beautiful.

What’s El Sauce like?

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

check out my slideshow …

http://www.geneseo.edu/geneseo_scene/el-sauce

El Sauce- pig procession

Back to the land of lakes and volcanoes.

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

I always tell reporters: Show, don’t tell. I could say that Manuel, the young man we provided a small grant to purchase a bicycle taxi so he could rent it out and go to school full time is now teaching English and earned a scholarship to one of the best institutes, and I could say that since completion of the artisan training that we helped fund, the Cerro Colorado basket-makers have sold orders to half a dozen U.S. businesses…

but it’s gonna be so much cooler to provide some photos and video.

August. Nicaragua. El Sauce. Can’t wait.

See what we did in Nicaragua

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

http://30dor.com/kris/TFP-Nicaragua.pdf — Click here to see the official newsletter and photos.

Nicholas, a coffee farmer in Ocotal, is launching an eco-tourism business with other farmers to help provide for their families and offer backpackers an intimate look at rural Nica life.

Nicholas, the Ocotal farmers eco-tourism

Path pavers.

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

Thanks to our two latest donors to future Friends Project projects:Dawn Robinson in Springwater, NY and Harvey and Martha Rhody of Fairport, NY. Both attended the “Amazon: A Fragile Balance” exhibit and decided to contribute to future improvement projects. Our grand total is now about $700.It doesn’t sound like so much, but we did amazing things with less than $500 in Peru. I’m examining a few projects in the Iquitos area and Nueva Esperanza so we can use this money; and show more p eople what we can do together and hopefully raise even more money for the next project. 

Amazon gallery show up

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Amazon show “Amazon: A Fragile Balance” is on exhibition at Ock Hee’s Gallery in upstate New York, in Honeoye Falls.The show includes images from my time living with colonists in the Brazilian Amazon who had a plague of mosquitoes on their land and were protesting for help in a roadside, makeshift camp (1991) and my time helping researchers in Peru, trekking in the forest, catching caimans to see what they had for lunch and launching health care and wildlife management programs in remote communities.Images explore the culture, the beauty of the forest and the wild of one of the few places left where nature, not man, is in control. It compels us to explore man’s struggle to co-exist with nature and what impact we have on the environment, and what can be lost.Several images feature communities that are recipients of the work The Friends Project does, including the Amazon Animal Orphanage (care for a baby howler monkey), Nueva Esperanza (window screens, a latrine, safe drinking-water program, shoes for kids) and Belén (school supplies).I’ll post some photos later of the images.